One of the most pernicious ideas that seems to have informed public policy for the last 30 years is that the private sector is better than the public one.
This can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher's often dismissive and suspicious view of the Civil Service and her thorough acceptance of the then fashionable Public Choice Theory and unwavering belief in free market economics as a way to regulate not just private enterprise, but the delivery of public services too.
This has lead to ridiculousness like privatised rail companies taking billions in state subsidies, but still paying shareholder dividends, whilst being subject to price caps because they operate regional monopolies.
By the time that 'New' Labour came to power in 1997 these ideas had become almost unquestionable, and Blair was quick to appropriate the langauge of the marketplace when describing the provisions of the state. In a continuation of Conservative policies of PFI and John Major's much ridiculed 'Citizen's Charter', New Labour energetically set out to provide 'consumers' of public services with 'choice'. Of course, 'choice' often wasn't 'choice' at all. And, in actual fact, there are many areas when people don't want 'choice', education being the obvious example - people don't want to choose between 10 schools for their children, they just want a one good one. The results of the promotion of 'choice' in this particular area of public service has been utterly disastrous.
But still the bandwagon rolls on. Andrew Lansley's much vaunted white paper 'Liberating the NHS' takes, amongst other things, this choice model and applies it to healthcare, arguing that by allowing 'consumers' of healthcare greater 'choice', standards will go up. This is oblivious to both the evidence from the education sector, and from the fact that when people are given 'choice' about healthcare, quackery and nonsense like homeopathy tend to do rather well - something homeopaths have been quick to point out. Not because people are stupid, but because they're not doctors.
The latest idea to be exported from our side of business to theirs is what might be losely termed UGC, or 'consumer participation'. Alex has written extensively about how to get this right here, so I won't rehash any of that. But we have had the Conservative Party manifesto being entitled 'An invitation to join the governemnt of Britain', George Osborne announcing that people will get a say in where cuts will fall (an initiative skewered with charcateristic aplomb by the Daily Mash), and yesterday the (re)launch of David Cameron's 'Big Society', which, though slightly hazy on detail, seems to be about getting people to do the business of government. So, if you don't like the schools in your area, you can set up your own. Nice one.
The problem with all this is that, like many (though not all) of the brands who seem to be moving into this space, you get the sense that this is not the result of some clearly cleverly thought through strategy, but instead a complete failure of imagination and vision. Again, we've written before about the dangers of encouraging participation, and the fallcy of the wisdom of crowds, but whilst I really don't care if only a handful of nutters decide to get involved with some kind of UGC campaign, I really do mind if they're running schools, or the transport network, or dictating foreign policy, or in fact, any of the things that governments have historically been responsible for.
Perhaps if government is really going to learn from successful businesses they should take a leaf out of Steve Jobs' book. When asked about consumer research and opinion, he responded, 'It's not the consumers' job to know what they're going to want next year. It's mine.'
Is it too much to expect the same level of conviction from our politicans?
- Toby
Comments